tedster - 1:33 am on Apr 15, 2009 (gmt 0)

As the article explains:

The key difference between these two urls is that instead of "/search?" the URL contains a "/url?". If you run your own analyses, be sure that you do not depend on the "/search?" portion of the URL to determine if a visit started with an organic search click. Google Analytics does not depend on the "/search?" string in the referrer, so users of Google Analytics will not notice a difference in their reports, but other analytics packages may need to adapt to this change in our referrer string to maintain accurate reports.

Also, they are rolling this out initially on a small scale - mindful of the recent analytics problems from the Ajax search results [webmasterworld.com].

Now the "why" for these changes comes into play, right? This blog post only comes from the Google Analytics team and their focus is not on the "why", just the "what".

My bet - this is the next step toward whatever the original Ajax results were trying to accomplish, including future enhancements to the results page itself, adding various kinds of onmouseover or onclick information and still preserving the Analytics information.